Learning the Language

Yesterday, President Obama visited a charter school in Madison, Wis., where 39 percent of students are English-language learners. But I don't see anything in news coverage about his visit that says he mentioned the educational needs of ELLs. (See update below.) It seems like a missed opportunity.

An editorial in the Wisconsin State Journal says the school, James C. Wright Middle School, takes an inclusive approach to educating ELLs and students with disabilities, which includes co-teaching and support for a universally designed curriculum. I'm intrigued.

Update: I skimmed his speech and see that President Obama did mention English-language learners at one point, saying that a commitment to education means "boosting the numbers of quality teachers who can help our special education and English-language learners meet high standards—as you've done here at Wright." But that still doesn't tell us much.

The Journal Sentinel of Milwaukee, Wis., reports the president mentioned he was working to ensure that children of undocumented immigrants can go to college. I interpret that statement as the president's reiteration of this support for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or "DREAM Act." The president's remark also likely indicates he realized a lot of his audience were Latinos, many of whom support that act.

But it would have been great if the president could have highlighted some ways that Wright Middle School is successful with ELLs, if in fact that is the case, since such students make up such a large proportion of the school population. Educators are looking for models for how to educate these students, particularly at the middle and high school levels.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at Curriculum Matters, my colleague Sean Cavanagh notes that the governing board for the National Assessment of Educational Progress will hold a public hearing on Monday, Nov. 9, to receive public input on policies for including English-language learners and students with disabilities on the test. The hearing will take place here in the nation's capital.

I recently blogged about results for ELLs in the most recent math assessment that is part of NAEP. See the comments from readers to get a sense of some of the issues that arise in including ELLs in the test and making sense of their scores.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his latest move to try to get Tucson Unified School District to halt offering ethnic studies, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction has commissioned a study looking at the test scores of students who take the ethnic studies compared with Hispanics in the state who don't.

The analysis of test scores found no significant effect of the courses on student performance on the state's academic tests. Horne put out a press release saying the Arizona Department of Education conducted the study to examine claims by the school district that students who take the ethnic studies courses, which focus on Mexican-American history and culture, perform better on state tests than students who don't.

The study compared the scores of 626 students who took the classes in Tucson last school year, compared with scores of Hispanics statewide. Eighty-five percent of students who took the ethnic studies classes were Hispanic. Fifteen percent were English-language learners. The Arizona Daily Star picked up on the study in an article published this week.

One thing I've learned about Horne over the years: If an educational issue is a concern for him, he will not give up in continuing to bring public attention to it.

I'm thinking about how he took the ELL funding issue in his state to the U.S. Supreme Court and how he sent his staff to the Mexican-U.S. border to gather video evidence that operators of a charter school were enrolling and transporting students who reside in Mexico across the border to attend school in the United States.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Of immigrants living in the United States who are age 25 and older, only 27.1 percent had a bachelor's degree or higher in 2008, according to facts put together by the Migration Policy Institute. Slightly more than half of immigrants, 52.1 percent, do not speak English "very well."

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey, nearly 38 million, or 12.5 percent, of the U.S. population was born in a foreign country. That compares with an immigrant population of 14.8 percent in 1890.

The fact sheet notes that the large presence of immigrants from Mexico and Asian countries in the early part of this century starkly contrasts with the predominance of immigrants in 1960 who came mostly from European countries.

The top five U.S. states by the number of immigrants in 2008 were California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Illinois.

Naturally, those are also big states for English-language learners in schools.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New Mexico has joined 19 states and the District of Columbia in adopting the most popular English-language-proficiency test in the nation, which is developed by the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment Consortium, or WIDA.

Starting this school year, New Mexico will administer WIDA's test to measure students' progress in learning English, ACCESS for ELLs, to about 60,000 ELLs, said Tom Dauphinee, the interim supervisor of assessment and accountability for the New Mexico education department, in a phone interview. In joining the WIDA consortium, the state also plans to use WIDA's screening and placement test for ELLs.

Dauphinee said that the state must use a bidding process to select test developers for all of its large-scale assessments. For its English-language-proficiency test, New Mexico received a bid from Pearson and from WIDA. Dauphinee said that WIDA won the bid in part because ACCESS for ELLs aligns well with New Mexico's standards for English-language proficiency. He added that the committee is pleased with how WIDA conducts research on English-language proficiency and uses that research to improve the assessment and professional development.

Previously New Mexico used what Dauphinee called an "off-the-shelf test" based on test items in the Stanford English Language Proficiency Test, owned by Harcourt and Pearson.

Timothy Boals, the executive director of WIDA, said that New Mexico is the first state that has joined WIDA through a state bidding process. "It's a grueling process, and a costly one as well, to go after a state like that," he said. "It's something commercial developers do all the time. This isn't our preferred way to go for it."

In the bidding process, Boals said, WIDA spelled out the same consortium package that it offers to all states.

But one aspect of WIDA's relationship with New Mexico is unique. Before the bidding process began, WIDA had worked with New Mexico to customize the WIDA English-language-development standards for that state. All other states that are part of the consortium have adopted the regular WIDA standards.

Even so, said Boals, the New Mexico English-language-development standards are very similar to the regular WIDA ones. The main difference, he said, is that some of the materials that support the standards, such as documents for teacher training, contain examples that are particularly relevant to New Mexico.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ruby Takanishi, co-editor of a new book titled Immigration, Diversity, and Education, tells New America Media that in the Obama administration, "immigrant children are not on anybody's agenda, except in a negative way."

Takanishi said she hasn't seen the needs of immigrant children discussed much in education initiatives presented by the administration, including Race to the Top funds from the federal stimulus package.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other federal officials have not highlighted the needs of English-language learners since President Obama took office. I can think of only one exception, which I blogged about earlier this week. One of three meetings that the federal government is hosting for public input about the distribution of $350 million in Race to the Top assessment funds will examine how to accurately measure the content knowledge of ELLs.

That's the only public meeting focused on ELLs that I've heard about under the administration. I'm not counting meetings that examined the needs of Latino students, where issues about ELLs may also have been mentioned.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Among students in Los Angeles Unified School District who are classified as English-language learners, 29 percent are not reclassified as fluent in English by the 8th grade, according to a study released by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute yesterday. The study looked at a cohort of nearly 29,000 students who were 6th graders in 1999. Nearly two-thirds of the cohort were ELLs and 42 percent of those ELLs were reclassified as fluent in English by the 5th grade. The study shows that those who are reclassified in elementary school or even early middle school tend to do well academically. Some 29 percent of ELLs were reclassified by the 8th grade. The remaining 29 percent of ELLs, more than half of them born in the United States, weren't reclassified by the 8th grade. The study didn't include special education students. The Associated Press picked up on the findings of the study. (Update: So did the Los Angeles Times.)

In 2002, I featured in EdWeek the stories of several long-term ELLs in Los Angeles who were born in the United States. Though many educators are concerned about long-term ELLs and talk about them at conferences, I know of few effective programs designed to address their needs. The New York City school district is one of the few I know of that commissioned researchers to study the issue and try an intervention aimed at long-term ELLs. (One of those researchers, Kate Menken, an assistant professor of linguistics at Queens College, was a guest for an EdWeek chat about long-term ELLs.)

The Tomas Rivera study says that a review of current reclassification rates of ELLs in Los Angeles indicates that the rate has not changed significantly in a decade.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The U.S. Department of Education has given a $1.6 million grant to the University of South Florida's college of education to research how to identify English-language learners and students from low socioeconomic levels who are gifted, according to the Tampa Tribune. The grant will fund a program called Recognizing Extraordinary Accomplishments of Children.

Elizabeth Shaunessy, an associate professor for gifted education at the university, plans to research how a nonverbal test, which uses picture patterns to assess intelligence, might increase the participation of ELLs and students from low-income families in gifted programs, the article says.

I feature this grant because it's one of the few efforts I've heard about in a decade of writing about ELLs that recognizes how such students can be evaluated for giftedness.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The American Federation of Teachers has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor that a teacher-recruiting company cheated more than 200 teachers from the Philippines out of thousands of dollars, according to a post by my colleague Stephen Sawchuk over at Teacher Beat.

Last year, The Washington Post Magazine published an article that helped me to understand some of the challenges Filipino teachers face who take teaching jobs in the United States in the hopes of improving the standard of living of their families back home. It's a sad thing, if the charges by the AFT are indeed true, that the teachers are being cheated out of money that is rightfully theirs as well.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The U.S. Department of Education has made English-language learners the focus of one of the three public meetings it will soon be hosting on how $350 million in Race to the Top funds for assessments should be given out. Holding a meeting to focus on ELLs is the strongest message that the Education Department has sent to the public so far, from my point of view, that ELLs should be the beneficiaries of stimulus funds.

The meeting on how to accurately measure the content knowledge of ELLs is scheduled for Dec. 1 and 2 in Denver.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act itself does not mention English-language learners specifically. A group of ELL experts has been urging school districts and states to include ELLs in their plans for spending stimulus funds.

Diane August, a senior research scientist for the Center for Applied Linguistics, who is a member of that group of ELL experts, said it's a good sign that one of the assessment meetings is highlighting needs of ELLs.

She said she'd like to see the federal government support efforts to make tests implemented for accountability purposes more useful for guiding teachers in improving instruction of ELLs and other students. August said that while often teachers don't receive student results from state tests in a timely manner, "even if they did, I don't think [the results] are geared to helping teachers figure out what to do in the classroom."

ELLs are subjected to more testing than most groups of students because the federal government requires them to be tested both in their progress in learning English and their academic content knowledge.

"It's a huge problem that so much time is spent testing that there is not time for instruction," August added.

I've heard some version of that concern from a number of teachers I've met across the country. And if some of those teachers can't make it out to the Mile High City for the meeting on ELL assessments, they still can respond to an invitation by the Education Department to submit comments on assessment issues in writing. Use the following e-mail address: racetothetop.assessmentinput@ed.gov.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)